Sweet zombie love plays out in 'Warm Bodies'

"Warm Bodies" appears to take the young-adult fiction romance formula to its absurd ultimate: Human girl doesn't fall in love with a dashing vampire or hunky werewolf, but with a rotting zombie.

Fortunately, author Isaac Marion and the folks responsible for adapting his Internet sensation turned novel to the screen understood how ridiculous their premise was and ran with it, making for a very funny horror love story that - yikes! - actually leaves you thinking yeah, this relationship could work.

"When I first read the script, the humor was one of the main things that I liked," notes Nicholas Hoult, the young English actor ("About a Boy," "X-Men: First Class," the British TV series "Skins") who plays R, a bored young zombie who hilariously questions his semi-existence via a voice-over inner monologue in "Warm Bodies."

"But I just really cared for the characters, I liked them instantly," he says.

"What I loved about 'Warm Bodies' is that it doesn't take itself too seriously," adds Teresa Palmer, who plays Julie, the human Juliet to R's Romeo, the combat-trained daughter of the leader of the living resistance to the zombie infestation. "You can't really do that with this quirky a take on the classic love story.

"But it does really ring true in a lot of ways," the Australian actress ("I Am Number Four," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") continued. "I think audiences are very surprised when they feel very connected to this blossoming love story. We wanted that to be very much grounded in reality. But we cracked a lot of jokes, and there's that wink at the camera a few times in the movie that make it really fun and different."

R and Julie don't exactly meet cute. On a scavenging mission outside their fortified compound (actually, downtown Montreal), Julie and her heavily armed friends are attacked by hungry zombies. R is one of them, and in the melee, he manages to eat the brains of Julie's ex-boyfriend. When zombies, who are generally amnesiac, do that, they experience the memories of those they're feasting on, and his dinner's love for Julie works its way into R's system.

Consequently, R saves Julie from getting eaten herself, and sneaks her back to the airliner he resides in at an undead-occupied airport. All but unable to speak, he has to somehow express the, um, warm, strange feelings he has to the terrified girl.

That's when things get even funnier. And bizarrely sweet.

"One of the story's best conceits is that he's doing his best, but most of us guys are bumbling fools around girls," the tall, soulful-eyed Hoult acknowledges. "He literally can't even form a sentence. He's doing his best, but he's kind of goofy at times."

"You have that central core thing, which is so smart about it, which is, yeah, he's just a shy guy trapped in his own body," says the movie's director and screenwriter, Jonathan Levine ("50/50," "The Wackness"). "I think a lot of guys can identify with that; I know I certainly can. That is like a central guidepost that allows you to cut through all of the other noise that could totally derail the movie.

"One of the main reasons I did the movie was that metaphor of what zombie-ism represents," Levine continued. "Also, it asks the question, what does it mean to be alive? That's something I certainly tackle every day. I mean, my strongest relationship is with my iPhone. I love my girlfriend, but I talk to my iPhone a lot more than I talk to her. So, what does it mean to be alive and are you living in the moment every day?"

Bringing the star-crossed characters to life wasn't easy, mainly because one of them wasn't living.

"It was exciting, not being able to talk, and the movement and trying to express without being too expressive and stuff," says Hoult. "Then there was that balance of trying to make it funny but not a parody. But playing it was tricky. It's not straightforward acting, in many ways, to try and pull that off."

"I thought it would be a challenge because R doesn't get to express himself verbally and Julie is doing all of the talking," Palmer adds. "I was worried about finding the chemistry and the rhythm of the scenes with not having anyone to bounce dialogue off of. But Nick Hoult is such a gifted actor that he was able to emote everything through his eyes. And his little, subtle choices with his facial expressions and his body language, I just had so much I could work off of."

And, unlike in most movies, she could do it well-rested. Since Julie is a post-apocalypse warrior/captive, Palmer and the filmmakers agreed that she didn't need to wear makeup.

"I was really happy to not be sitting in the hair and makeup chair for hours and hours," she says. "Usually, you look at the call sheet and the girl's pickup time is, like, 4:30 in the morning and the guy gets to come in two hours later. But on this film, it was totally the opposite. It was like, `Teresa Palmer, pickup 7:30 a.m.'; Nicholas Hoult, it was like, 3:30 a.m.!"

Yep, Hoult's zombie makeup had to be applied just so to make him look dead but, y'know, still cute enough for a hot girl to give him a chance. And as the story unfolds, R's look changes. You'll have to see why, but let's just say it should make the little hearts of young-adult fiction fans go pitty-pat.

Their boyfriends should enjoy "Warm Bodies" too, though, and not just for the snarky humor and emo undercurrents.

"I don't read a lot of it, I don't watch many of those films," Hoult says of the young-adult genre, although he's surely schooled in at least one other series; he dated Jennifer Lawrence, star of the blockbuster "Hunger Games" films, for two years.

"I think this film has some of those elements to it, but I believe both boys and girls can relate to it. It's not something so sappy that guys aren't going to want to sit through it. It's got a little bit of action and some gore."